Lexicology And Lexicography Research Paper

2. The Lexicon

The lexicon of a language is stored primarily in the head of its speakers, and for most of the history of mankind, it was only stored there. We do not know what form the ‘mental lexicon’ has. There is agreement, however, that it consists of individual lexical units which are somehow interrelated to each other. There is no generally accepted term for lexical units. The familiar term ‘word’ is both too broad and too narrow; one would not want to consider goes as a lexical unit, although it is a word, whereas expressions such as (to) cut up or red herring are lexical units but consist of several words. Other terms occasionally found are ‘lexeme,’ ‘lemma,’ or ‘lexical entry,’ but since these are also used in other ways, it is probably best to speak of lexical units.

It is important to distinguish between a lexical unit and the way in which it is named. The word house in a dictionary, followed by all sorts of explanations, is not the lexical unit—it is a name for such a unit. The lexical unit itself is a bundle of various types of properties. These include:

(a) phonological properties, which characterize how the lexical unit is pronounced; they include sounds, syllabic structure, lexical accent and, in some languages, lexical tone;

(b) graphematic properties, which characterize how the lexical unit is written;

(c) morphosyntactic properties, which characterize how the unit can become part of more complex expressions; typically, they concern inflectional paradigm, word class, government relations, and others;

(d ) semantic properties, which concern the ‘lexical meaning’ of the unit, i.e., the contribution which it makes to the meaning of the construction in which it occurs.

Some of these properties may be absent. This is most obvious for graphematic properties, since not all languages are written. There are a few lexical units without lexical meaning, such as the expletive there in English. Many linguists also stipulate ‘zero elements,’ i.e., units with morphosyntactic and semantic properties but without phonological properties (such as ‘empty pronouns’); but these are normally treated in the grammar rather than in the lexicon.

Whereas these four types of properties are the defining characteristics of a lexical unit, other information may be associated with it, for example, its etymology, its frequency of usage, its semantic counterpart in other languages, or encyclopedic knowledge (thus, it is one thing to know the meaning of bread and a different thing to know various sorts of bread, how it is made, its price, its role in the history of mankind, etc.).

The lexical units of a lexicon are in many ways interrelated. They may share some phonological properties (for example, they may rhyme with each other), they may belong to the same inflectional paradigm, they may have the opposite meaning (‘antonyms,’ such as black and white), approximately the same meaning (‘synonyms,’ such as to begin and to start), or when complex in form they may follow the same construction pattern. Lexicological research is often oriented towards these interrelations, whereas lexicography tends to give more weight to the lexical unit in itself. In general, there is much more lexicographical than lexicological work (for a survey of the latter, see Schwarze and Wunderlich 1985); in fact, if there is any piece of linguistic description for some language, it is probably an elementary bilingual dictionary. The depth of this work varies massively not only across languages, but also with respect to the particular lexical properties. Whereas the phonological, graphematic and morphosyntactic features of the lexicon in Latin, English, French, and some dozen other languages with a comparable research tradition are fairly well described, there is no theoretically and empirically satisfactory analysis of the semantics of the lexicon for any language whatsoever. This has three interrelated reasons. First, there is no well-defined descriptive language which would allow the researcher to represent the meaning of some lexical unit, be it simple or compound; the most common practice is still to paraphrase it by an expression of the same language. Second, there is no reliable and easily applicable method of determining the lexical meaning of some unit; the most common way is to look at a number of occurrences in ongoing text and to try to understand what it means. Third, the relation between a particular form and a particular meaning is hardly ever straightforward; this is strikingly illustrated by a look at what even a medium-sized English dictionary has to say about the meaning of, for example, on, sound, eye or (to) put up. As a rule, there is not just one lexical meaning, but a whole array of uses which are more or less related to each other. This is not merely a practical problem for the lexicographer; it also casts some doubt on the very notion of ‘lexical unit’ itself.

3. Making Dictionaries

Lexicographers often consider their work to be more of an art or a craft than a science (see, e.g., Landau 1984, Svensen 1993). This does not preclude a solid scientific basis, but it reflects the fact that their concrete work depends largely on practical skills such as being ‘a good definer,’ on one hand; and that it is to a great extent determined by practical, often commercial, concerns, on the other. Dictionaries are made for users, and they are intended to serve specific purposes. Their compilation requires a number of practical decisions.

3.1 Which Lexical Units Are Included?

Languages are neither well-defined nor uniform entities; they change over time, and they vary with factors such as place, social class, or area talked about. A great deal of this variation is lexical. It is not possible nor would it be reasonable to cover this wealth in a single dictionary. Large dictionaries contain up to 300,000 ‘entries’; since idiomatic expressions are usually listed under one of their components (such as to kick the bucket under (to) kick), they contain many more lexical units, perhaps up to 1 million. But, even so, they are by no means exhaustive. The second edition of the Deutsches Worterbuch (see Sect. 5), the largest dictionary of German, covers less than 25 per cent of the lexical units found in the sources, and these sources are quite restricted themselves.

3.2 Which Lexical Properties Are Described?

Just as it is impossible to include all lexical units of a language in a dictionary, it is neither possible nor desirable to aim at a full description of those which are included. Since a dictionary is normally a printed book, the graphematic properties of the unit (its ‘spelling’) are automatically given. Among the other defining properties, meaning is traditionally considered to be most important. Samuel Johnson’s dictionary from 1755 (see Sect. 5) defines ‘dictionary’ as ‘A book containing the words of any language in alphabetical order, with explanations of their meaning.’ But Johnson also noted which syllable carries the main stress, and he gave some grammatical hints. In general, however, information on phonological properties was rare up to the end of the nineteenth century, and information on grammatical properties is usually still very restricted in nonspecialized dictionaries. But there are, of course, also dictionaries which specifically address these properties as well as some of the nondefining properties associated with a lexical entry, such as its origin (etymological dictionary) or, above all, its equivalent in other languages (‘bilingual dictionary’).

3.3 What Is The Description Based Upon?

Usually, two types of sources are distinguished: ‘primary sources’ are samples of text in which the unit is used, ‘secondary sources’ refers to prior work of other lexicographers (and lexicologists). In fact, there is a third source, normally not mentioned in the theory of lexicography (sometimes called ‘meta-lexicography’): this is the lexicographer’s own knowledge of the language to be described, including his or her views on what is ‘good’ language. In practice, the bulk of a new dictionary is based on older dictionaries. This is always immoral and often illegal, if these are simply copied; but on the other hand, it would be stupid and arrogant to ignore the achievements of earlier lexicographers.

3.4 How Is The Information Presented?

A dictionary consists of lexical entries arranged in some conventional order. Normally, an entry combines several lexical units under a single ‘head word’; thus, all lexical units which include the word put may be listed under this head word, forming a kind of nest with an often very complex microstructure. We are used to alphabetically-ordered dictionaries; but there are other possibilities, for example, by thematic groups or by first appearance in written documents. Languages without alphabetic writing require different principles; in Chinese, for example, entries are usually arranged by subcomponents of the entire character and by the number of strokes.

These four questions can be answered in very different ways, resulting in very different types of dictionaries (see the survey in Hausmann et al. 1991, pp. 968–1573).

4. History

The first lexicographic documents are lists of Sumerian words (up to 1400) with their Akkadian equivalents, written in cuneiform script on clay tablets about 4,700 years ago. The practice compiling such word lists was continued throughout Antiquity and the Middle Ages; thus, the oldest document in German, the Abrogans (written around 765), is an inventory of some Latin words with explanations in German. Usually, these ‘glossaries’ did not aim at a full account of the lexicon; they simply brought together a number of words which, for one reason or another, were felt to be ‘difficult,’ and explained them either by a more familiar word in the same language or by a translation. Words were ordered alphabetically, by theme, or not at all. But there are also more systematic attempts, such as the Catholicon, a mixture of encyclopedia and dictionary which, compiled around 1250, was the first printed lexical work in Europe (Mainz 1460).

In the sixteenth century, two developments led to major changes. The first of these was the invention of printing by Gutenberg. By 1500, virtually all classical authors were available in print, thus offering a solid basis for systematic lexical accounts of Latin and Greek, such as Calepinus’ Dictionarium (1502), soon to be followed by two early masterpieces: Robert Etienne’s Dictionarium seu Latinae Linguae Thesaurus (Paris 1531) and Henri Etienne’s Thesaurus Graecae Linguae (Paris 1572). The second major development was the slow but steady rise of national languages. Since early Italian, French, English, or German were hardly codified, a major aim of the first dictionaries in these languages was to give them clear norms. In some countries, national Academies were founded to this end. The outcome were dictionaries with a strongly normative, often puristic, stance, such as the Vocabulario degli Academici della Crusca (Venice 1612), the Dictionnaire de l’Academie Francaise (Paris 1694) and the Diccionario de autoridades publicado por la Real Academia Espanola (1726–1739).

The bulk of lexicographic work, however, was always done by enterprising publishers and engaged individuals, such as Dr Samuel Johnson. Helped by six assistants, he produced A Dictionary of the English Language (London 1755), the first scholarly description of the English vocabulary, in less than eight years. It surpassed all its predecessors, including Bailey’s Dictionarium Britannicum from 1736, which Johnson took as his point of departure, by the systematic use of quotations, taken from the best writers, and by his brilliant, sometimes somewhat extravagant, definitions (not everybody would dare to characterize patriotism as ‘the last refuge of a scoundrel’). Less known, much less witty, but broader in coverage is the first comprehensive dictionary of German, Johann Christoph Adelungs Versuch eines ollstandigen grammatisch-kritischen Worterbuchs der hochdeutschen Mundart (Leipzig 1774–86).

The rise of historical-comparative linguistics in the early nineteenth century led to an enormous increase in grammatical and lexical knowledge. The first dictionary which tried to cover this knowledge was the Deutsches Worterbuch by Jacob Grimm and (to a much lesser extent) his brother Wilhelm Grimm. Its first fascicle appeared in 1852, after about ten years of preparatory work, in which the Grimms were helped by about 100 scholars providing excerpts (‘covering my desk like snowflakes,’ Jacob Grimm). At that time, it was already clear that the original plan of 6–7 volumes, to be finished within 10–12 years, was unrealistic. The Grimms finished only letters A–(most of ) F, and the final folio volume (of altogether 32) appeared in 1960. This long duration, as well as the varying talents and preferences of the contributors, has led to many inconsistencies; some entries got out of balance (no less than 60 pages are devoted to the single word Geist); still, it is an incommensurable source of lexical information.

The work of the Grimms inspired a number of similar ventures, such as Emile Littre’s masterly Dictionnaire de la langue francaise (1863–1873), which is much shorter, but also much more consistent: Matthias de Vries and his numerous successors’ voluminous Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal (1864–1998), and finally A New English Dictionary on a Historical Basis (1884–1928), generally referred to as the ‘Oxford English Dictionary’ (OED). It was initiated in 1857 by the philologist and churchman Richard Trench; in 1860, members of the Philological Society started to collect excerpts; in 1879, the Clarendon Press appointed James Murray as the Principal Editor. The first fascicle appeared in 1882, and the whole work was completed in 1928, 13 years after Murray’s death. More than 200 scholars were involved in its production, more than 2,000 people are known to have contributed excerpts. The OED is not without flaws, even in its revised edition, which appeared in 1989 in print and in 1992 on CD-ROM; but among all attempts to describe the lexicon of a language, it comes closest to falsify what Dr Johnson stated in the preface to his own dictionary: ‘Every other author may aspire to praise; the lexicographer can only hope to escape reproach.’ (For a comprehensive survey of lexicographic work across languages, see Hausmann et al. 1991, pp. 1679–2710, 2949–3119).

5. The Use Of Computers

We tend to think of dictionaries as the normal, if not the only possible way to compile and to present lexical information. But the dawn of the computer has provided us with a very different and in many ways more efficient tool. Computers can be used in at least three ways in lexicography. It is possible to transfer an existing dictionary to a computer, as has often been done over the last 20 years. Such a transfer offers several advantages: search is faster and more exhaustive; it is easier to revise and update the dictionary; and it is possible to add information not available in book format, for example, spoken sound instead of phonetic transcriptions. But essentially, the format of the printed book is maintained. Next, computers are a powerful tool in the production of a new dictionary. Rather than having a number of people read through books and newspapers and make excerpts of all occurrences which look interesting, it is now possible to compile huge text corpora that cover all varieties of a language, to scan these texts for all occurrences of words or word combinations, to sort these occurrences by various criteria, to link them to other occurrences, to add as much context as needed, etc.

The OED, is based on about 5 million excerpts, mostly handwritten on paper slips. A computer can easily process corpora of several hundred million words, i.e., several hundred million occurrences; new sources can rapidly be added. This allows a much broader and much more representative coverage of a lexicon than ever. But electronic corpora only provide the raw material; it still awaits lexical analysis. This analysis can be facilitated by computer tools, also; but no computer can tell us what a word means in a particular context. But even if only one minute is devoted to each occurrence in a one-hundred million corpus, it would take 10 lexicographers 100 years to go through it. This means that printed dictionaries can never reflect the wealth of information accessible in large corpora, since they presuppose that the lexicographer has finished the analysis. Therefore, the only way to make full use of large corpora is by means of lexical retrieval systems. They consist of (a) a computer-accessible and expandable corpus, (b) a set of tools, which allow, for example, not only the search for certain items but also statistical analysis or the determination of the first occurrence, and (c) a selective but steadily proceeding lexical analysis of the corpus. Thus, it is possible to add spoken forms in various dialects, information about word classes, or the semantic analysis of some subset of lexical units, say all prepositions or all morphologically simple verbs. Similarly, translation equivalents can be added. Unlike printed dictionaries, such a lexical retrieval system will never come to an end, it is steady work-in-progress to which many can contribute and which will give us a deeper and broader understanding of the lexicon than any other method.

Bibliography:

1. Hausmann F-J, Reichmann O, Wiegand H E, Zgusta L (eds.) 1991 Worterbucher—Dictionaries—Dictionnaires. De Gruyter, Berlin
2. Landau S A 1984 Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. Scribner, New York
3. McArthur T 1986 Worlds of Reference. Lexicography, Learning and Language from the Clay Tablet to the Computer. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK
4. Schwarze C, Wunderlich D (eds.) 1985 Handbuch der Lexikologie. Athenaum, Konigstein, Germany
5. Svensen B 1993 Practical Lexikography. Principles and Methods of Dictionary Making. Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK